


the greenhouse glass is broken

by gogollescent



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-30
Updated: 2012-12-30
Packaged: 2017-11-22 22:49:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/615244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jade English, leaving home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the greenhouse glass is broken

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cosmogyral](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmogyral/gifts).



She was thirteen when her stepmother threw her in the reservoir.

She had been uprooting peanut plants in the garden, taking a certain abstract pleasure in the texture of the soil, and the tenderness of the stems in her hands. When she looked up the baroness was standing over her, face still. It was 1923, and Betty Crocker wore lace at her throat and her wrists, her skirts raised by dark gray hands to bare the gold-tipped boots. Once, earlier than that, Jade had tried telling her that gold was too soft to walk on; her stepmother, without very much concern for small logics, had said, "I'll walk on _you._ "

Now she said nothing. The sun broke on her shoulders like the tide. She picked her ward up bodily and carried her towards the lake's edge with Jade clawing at her wrists in furious silence-- Jade’s mouth was sealed by a pink and briny palm. It was hot, murderous day on the late Colonel's estate, and the hired hands turned and looked when they passed, unused to seeing the baroness out before dark. Her stepmother caressed her neck as she might have a jug. "That's right," said the baroness. "Give it your all." Or 'squall'; she had a slippery accent. At the bluff that overlooked the lake she dropped Jade on her back.

"Oh, shit," said Jade, falling, and then the water broke.

She might have blacked out for a few seconds, or closed her eyes in self-defense. Certainly the next thing she was aware of was the delayed shock of the cold, and the surface already reformed above her head. Fully dressed and unprepared for sport, she had sunk like a stone. You're a witch, other children told her, when she ventured past the boundaries of the estate. Wouldn't she rise unaided?

No, thought Jade. I won't. She scrabbled at her shoes. The leather was thick and unpliant, but her progress was slowing now that she had reached a greener depth, and weightlessly she tumbled through striations of shade: hand over ankle, hand over mouth, the bubbles streaming anyway off her clenched teeth like fat. Hair frayed her sight. She had, months earlier, cut open the breast of a corpse, and seen fat curling in beads beneath the skin-- the taxidermist she was assisting had laughed at the look on her face. Said, think about that when you’re growing your own pair, sweetheart, but at this rate her body would never be found, let alone finished, and she was thinking about opened flesh with her face turned toward foaming air.

Something touched her from below. In panic one shoe came wrenchingly free, and she rolled and swung, hitting a soft curl of sunless meat, which recoiled like light into the murk. She’d bitten through her lip. She thought, at once--

_BELONG TO US_

There was not enough murk in the world.

The thing in the lake with her must have been twenty feet from base to summit, its limbs piled across the bottom like frost. It looked a little like a squid and a little like a spider. Across its upturned face, curls of weed floated on invisible currents: dense aurorae. It was so quiet, under her, and shot with green. What did you do with that? Silence and the thudding of blood in your sore ears?

She dropped the shoe.

Fourteen eyes opened. This was a monster, and its glance yawned in an echo of gates, each pupil edged with glass.

_HELLO SUNSHINE_

The other shoe went the way of its partner. Lightened, she swam for sky. 

*** 

When she broke the surface it was everything she could do not to slip down again, her shoulders aching and her lungs raw from cold. She paddled frantically for a few minutes with her hair floating around her submerged chin, until she saw, along the line of low cliffs, a break-- a gravel beach, beyond that a dark grove. Waterblind, she hauled herself into the wake of the pines and lay there, gasping, rocks ground into her cheek.

She slept for several hours. The light had turned pinkish by the time she woke up, although the sky still arced pale overhead; and the shadows of the trees lay long on the water, coloring its facets deeply green. Nowhere did she see any sign of the beast.

“All right,” she said to no one, wringing out her shirt-tails. “Fine. I see how it is.” She set her mouth.

Getting back into the house was harrowing but not hard. She saw her stepmother coming out the back door, and stood pressed against the westward wall until the other woman had made her way to the waiting driver by the north gate. At the car, the baroness paused, the fins of her flat jaw flaring behind the artful curls that framed her face. Jade saw her sniff, a little, her snub nose raised, and the pink nostrils deep. But the wind didn’t betray her, and after another moment her stepmother stepped in.

The car drove off. Jade looked up and saw John at the window. He raised his eyebrows, once, then turned away, his hand trailing the imprint of his glance on the thick glass.

Inside she picked a rifle from the Colonel’s untouched room and loaded it with six rounds of shot. She spat a little blood into the sink, and rubbed her brittle hair with a soft cloth, and went back to the beach with her hands trembling a little under the weight of arms. 

*** 

By eight she had begun to think better of the exercise. The moon had risen; it was bitterly cold, and her wrists' undersides were white from chill. There were pretty good odds that what she’d seen had been an oxygen-starved brain’s fantasy. There were pretty bad odds that what she’d seen had been. In her damp dress she looked out at the water, and saw it shiver blackly beneath a powdered sky.

"Hello?" she said.

Another ripple. Barefoot, she approached foam. "I'm here," she said, cautiously, and when that provoked no answer: "I'm STILL HERE," the words swelling to crack through the fragile night. She was tired. She thought abruptly that the wind had changed direction, with all the diamond motion of the water shifting away from her rather than towards, and she was about to shout again when like a shipwreck in reverse the monster of the lake lifted its eyes above the waterline.

Or rather, raised water with it: water pouring in runnels down its shapeless body, and glazing its vast head. Under the lake's once-solid surface she could make out huge, isolate shapes-- the thing’s heaving legs, the absurd meat. The moon above her had been small, flat, brushed like bone to translucency; now it was pinkly red.

"Uhhh," she said, and in her skepticism almost shot it in the face.

_UHHHHHH?_

This mocking, pondeorous. She stepped closer. "Excuse me if I'm a little surprised," she said, eyes narrowed. "It's not every day I meet what I _bet_ is an undiscovered species, living in my lake."

_THIS IS NOT YOUR LAKE_

She stopped.

"No," she said, "it's my stepmother's lake."

The baroness had had it dug when the Colonel died, expanding off the crater/crime scene. The mechanism for its filling Jade had never asked about: it was enough that she saw the waters rise, vacant and blue, and unpreventable. The largest body of water in a hundred miles, and when it was done her stepmother had stood in front of it with her hand shading her eyes, looking as if she was dying of thirst.

_WE KNOW_

_SHE IS OURS_

_WE KNOW WHAT IS HERS_

Behind her molars Jade tasted blood.

“What’s your name?” she said, slowly.

_GL’BGOLYB EMISSARY TO THE CIRCLE ABOVE_

“Gl’bgolyb?”

A hint of diffidence entered into the sonorous mental tones. _JUNIOR,_ said the lake-thing.

She looked at it. It looked at her. She decided not to ask.

"Where did she get you from? What are you?" she said instead, hoisting her gun higher under her arm. "What do you mean, she’s yours?"

_A CLONING FACILITY AN EMISSARY WE ARE THAT WHICH SHE TRUSTS_

“Then why are you talking to me?” said Jade, and there was a flicker, as of uncertain translation. Hesitance? _\--keeper, custodian, promised--_ The image of Bec, white in its mind _._

She did shoot it then. Six rounds, her shoulder spasming with the intricacy of her pulse, and the bullets vanished into skin like stones dropped in a sea. One, lodging just above a swollen eye, broke far enough into the tract of flesh to draw a fat black bubble of blood, swelling to translucence and then gone. It blinked. She was shaking too much to reload.

_ARE YOU QUITE DONE_

"Yes," she said, and lowered the muzzle.

_WE HAVE BEEN VERY LONELY,_ said Gl'bgolyb Jr.

"I kind of guessed," she said. 

*** 

The Colonel left careful records of Bec’s pedigree, which extended back to 1413 and featured animals with names like You Must Burn This Book “Trotsky” III (short form). His widow never condescended to send Jade to school, declaring herself too busy with the management of his estate, but by the time she was eight Jade had taught herself to read with genealogies, poring over daguerrotypes of Bec’s pure-white ancestors. So it was a shame that taken together the papers made little biological sense. Bec was pure wolfhound, and descended from terriers; his grandsire had lived forty years, and his granddam was a polecat. He existed unto himself.

When she was six, her stepmother always said, she’d thought she was a dog. It wasn't true: she had a head for categories even then, and she knew, for example, that her stepmother was less human than Bec, and less earthly than her brother who fell out of the sky. She was competent in the division of species. Maybe she went around on all fours, but that was because, closer to the ground, she had less room to fall. She did remember sleeping with her head on Bec's bald and tender stomach, his loose pink skin flaking against her cheek. She had not then spent the night in the same room as a bed.

She still didn’t know where her stepmother slept. Her stepmother went out at nights and came home in the mornings, sunflushed and blinking, her whole face numinously soft. Sometimes she tripped over Jade, and said, Whale, I never! prodding her side with an indifferent shoe. On its retreat from her flat gut Jade bit her slippered toe.

At least, that was their routine. In those days the baroness was about five times Jade’s height, not counting the horns, and she didn't love her: which are pretty bad marks against a person, in the accounting of children, but Jade could have forgiven her both if she’d believed that Jade was real. Instead she used to pick her up with unpracticed hands, her dark eyes critical, and hold her out as though she thought she would weaponize her grip. She would say, Titchy thing, you are the bane of me. In fact she was always telling Jade that. How much she speared her, how little she understood her, how cod almighty she did believe she was a leakin' _mammal._ What later revolutionaries won't suspect of their tyrant-- she learned English from a Southern gentleman, and could drop good lords like a girl.

"What do you think she is?" Jade asked John, who could sleep anywhere. Sometimes he even used the thing their stepmother had given him, which looked to Jade like a giant cooking pot but which he said was "kinda comfy!", although he emerged from it, every time, with a husk of beetleback iridescence attached to his skin. It was one of the cooking-pot days when she brought it up, and she was peeling, with painstaking care, the dried sheeny slime from his flat nose. The two of them sat face to face in the bay window. Sunlight plated his damp neck with solid gold. He looked at her like she was crazy, and like he loved her.

"She's our mother," he said. That was John. 

*** 

From the private archives of CrockerCorp:

INTERVIEWER: Your sister was thirteen when she first left home?

JC: Was she? No, she must have been older than that. I think she was sixteen.

INTERVIEWER: I see. Can you tell me a little about the circumstances surrounding her departure?

JC: Uh, there was-- that's a bit private, isn't it? I mean, you could be asking her, if you really wanted to know. [pause] I'm sure she'd be happy to share.

INTERVIEWER: Have you spoken to your sister recently, Mr. Crocker?

JC: No. Not for a couple of years now.

INTERVIEWER: Then perhaps you aren't aware that following the collapse of her second start-up she has retreated from the public eye, and the last reporter NYT sent after her returned less a leg and richer by a phobia of tigers?

JC: I got a postcard.

[…]

INTERVIEWER: Frankly, we're starting to worry that we're going to need to rehaul the stock obituary.

JC: Haha, what?

INTERVIEWER: Please put your hands above your head, Mr. Crocker.

\-- transcript of an interview with John Crocker conducted on October 25th, 1954. Transcript abridged by assassination attempt, failed.

_Archivist’s note: I am so glubbin proud a you._  

*** 

The circumstances surrounding her departure: Bec’s body, his bone legs, the trail of blood splintered by long grass. He had ankles like a lady’s wrists and she got on one knee by his bent head, the open mouth, the tongue spilling from over the white teeth. His eyes were already shut, and might never have been open. In fact she was aware of him, mainly, as a white solid body, like snow in the middle of summer, mounded below the stars.

She picked him up. He was pretty heavy. He'd been living for a while now off what she could scrounge for him and what he could himself kill, which sometimes meant coming home and finding him with a mouth full of mutant fairy-calf, or else finding him smeared, all around his head and throat, with blood as green as absinthe; or else finding him dead. The holes in his side were small, round, no longer leaky. His body stiffening-- she looped one arm around his ribcage, hoisted him like a carpet. She brought him to the beach.

She didn’t visit Gl’bgolyb often; didn’t like to, and didn’t need to, to make sure that Gl’bgolyb always appeared when she did. It was a new moon, and Gl’bgolyb a shadowy monolith, its beak cresting the waves.

_MY DEAR WHAT HAVE YOU DONE_

“It doesn’t matter,” said Jade. “I’ve brought you something.”

Afterwards, she washed her hands in the bloody lakewater and wiped the pink film off on her skirt. “You’ll tell her that I drowned,” she said.

_YOU REALLY THINK SHE WILL BELIEVE THAT_

“I think she’ll believe you.”

_OKAY_

“Okay.”

She turned. Behind her:

_THANKS_

_FOR THE HOT DOG_

Most of the things her stepmother’s stepmother’s freshwater clone had told her over the years, she had already known. Some, not so much. “Goodbye, Gl’bgolyb,” said Jade English. She went back to her own rooms to pack.

John was waiting for her, his face pale.

“Are you really going?” he said.

“ _We’re_ going,” she said, but refusal was written all across his face. She reached to touch his hand, and he flinched a little. In the midnight grey they looked pretty alike. She slung her travelling bag over her shoulder and held out her open palm for a handshake, instead, which after a wary moment he submitted to, not without hugging her after. “Why are you so stupid?” she said, when he pulled away. “I’ll protect you. You know I will.”

“That’s not what I’m worried about,” said John. “Who’s going to protect you?”

Implicit: if you’re busy hauling my butt. Also implicit: I’m tired and afraid, and you scare me more than our mother.

She didn’t try to convince him otherwise. In his own way, he could be as immoveable as she could, although most days he fluttered like an unknotted scarf. She walked off the grounds with his eyes on her back, and when she hit the road she rocked back on her heels and looked up, further, to the thousand stars that blinked myopically down at her, each one as small and perfect as the beating of her heart.


End file.
